Book Club Update

As promised, this is a "minor" update, i.e. I'm not making a new top-level post to prompt new reading for this week, but sticking to a comment. We have new information on meeting times, and new chunks to read. Next week we will start on Chapter 2, this time with a top-level update. We'll see how this works.

New live meeting schedule

The spreadsheet has proven effective as a way to coordinate meeting times for widely scattered participants starting from suboptimal initial values. The most voted-on time is UTC+18 which is around 1pm in the Bay area, 9pm in Europe (other offsets can be looked up in the table). Participants have suggested a weekend meeting. I have updated the post above to reflect the new information.

Stil, of (now) 80 participants listed in the spreadsheet, only 16 have indicated a preferred meeting time so far. If you're interested in live meetings and haven't updated your info yet, please do so.

Reading for the week of 21/06

We continue with Chapter 1, sections: Boolean Algebra - Adequate Sets of Operations - The Basic Desiderata - Comments - Common Language vs Formal Logic - Nitpicking

(The Comments section is well worth reading, as it introduces the Mind Projection Fallacy which LW readers who have gone through the Sequences should be familiar with.)

Questions for the second part of Chapter 1 (some participants have already started on that, which is fine):

• Jaynes discusses a "tricky point" with regard to the difference between the everyday meaning of the verb "imply" and its logical meaning; are there other differences between the formal language of logic and everyday language?
• Can you think of further desiderata for plausible inference, or find issues with the one Jaynes lays out?